Man sentenced in NC plot to behead terror witness

Elshiekh was prescribed several psychiatric drugs that impaired her ability to reason and made her pliable to the will of others, the psychiatrist said.

At Hysen Sherifi's direction, Elshiekh gave a collection of gold jewelry given to her by her ex-husband to the younger brother, who pawned the pieces to raise the $5,000 he believed was needed to hire the hit man to execute the first victim.

Elshiekh claimed she had no idea what the money was for until she followed her paramour's direction to meet with a woman in a parked car. The woman, an informant for the FBI, showed Elshiekh a photo of one of the targeted witnesses and asked her to confirm that was the first man to be killed.

Though she then knew what the money was for, Elshiekh continued on with the plot for another 20 days until her arrest.

In her early court appearances, Elshiekh wore a headscarf and a black dress that fully covered her arms and legs. On Friday, her long hair trailed down her back and she wore western clothes.

In a tearful apology before the court on Friday, she accepted responsibility for what she had done.

"I wish I could turn back time, but I can't do that," she told the judge. "I never wanted anyone to get hurt."

Wearing shackles and a black Chicago T-shirt, Shkumbin Sherifi declined to address the judge before sentencing.

The Sherifis are ethnic Albanians who fled Kosovo in 1999 during a brutal sectarian war with Serbs and ended up as refugees in Raleigh. Though Hysen gravitated toward a militant strain of Islam, his younger siblings acclimated more readily to life in America. Shkumbin went so far as to record an amateur rap album.

Among those testifying Friday was one of the government witnesses Hysen Sherifi wanted dead. Melvin Weeks was a U.S. Army soldier serving in Kosovo after the war when he met the older Sherifi, who was visiting his grandparents.

Weeks, a Muslim, said Sherifi praised Osama bin Laden and showed him jihadist videos that included a hostage being beheaded. Though an American bombing campaign had saved the ethnic Albanians from genocide just a few years earlier, Weeks said Sherifi called for holy war against the very nation that gave his family a new home.

"In my opinion, he is a devil manifested here on Earth, walking among us," the former soldier said.